"The NHS will last as long as there are folk left with the faith to fight for it"Aneurin Bevan

Tuesday, 9 November 2010

NHS Funding

Michael Blastland from the BBC gives some graphs which show how the pledge that the Conservatives are protecting the NHS budget is basically a lie. (The Riddle of the NHS Budget). I have downloaded the data myself from ukpublicspending.co.uk and applied some colouring to make the situation clearer. Here is my version of the graph of NHS funding as a percentage of GDP:

The blue are Tory years, Red are Labour years and the dotted line is the expected spending outlined in the CSR. The reason that the line goes down is because in real terms NHS funding will fall by on average 0.1% every year (a fall of 0.54% between the 2010/11 and 2014/15 figures) yet GDP is expected to rise over this period. remember this poster? Complete and utter lies, and the graph above prove it.